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Other Voices on Family Stories Pete Seeger Jim Houston Utah Phillips
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by Joe McHugh My interest in family stories as a unique form of storytelling begins, not unexpectedly, with a story. I was asked some years ago to teach a week-long course on folktales at Davis and Elkins College as part of their Augusta Heritage summer folkarts program. I designed the course so that each day of the week we would explore one or two kinds of folktales—the humorous anecdote, the hero adventure tale, the creation myth, the tall tale, the ghost story, and so on. The first evening after my class had ended I was having supper in the college dining hall when a woman came up to me. She was not one of my students, but she had a gift for me. It was a large round button similiar to those handed out during political campaigns. It had a colorful quilt pattern painted on it with the words, "Tell Me Your Family Stories." (I learned later that the woman was an artist and that she carried a button making machine with her everywhere she went. She would often paint custom buttons for people she met with along the way.) I was charmed by the gift and promptly pinned it to my shirt. And almost immediately people began coming up to me eager to tell me their family stories. One man who was taking an Appalachian fiddle class told me about how his grandfather, a farmer from the hill country of North Carolina, traveled one time to a seacoast city where he traded a valuable pocket watch to a sailor he met for an unusal carved ebony statue from Africa. Another woman told me how her uncle, recently arrived in Wisconsin from Norway, ate an entire ear of corn at a picnic one day, cob and all, because he thought that’s what tough Americans did. After four days of being told such wonderful stories as I went about the campus I decided to dedicate the last full day of my class exclusively to understanding and sharing family stories. I was beginning to see that there was more to this business of telling family stories than simply passing on historical information from one generation to the next. Family stories were also folktales that created and sustained a collective myth, a structure of meaning reaching beyond the earthly realms of time and place to express something essential about the invisible life of the soul, a highly individualized folktale where Zeus becomes Grandpa Handley and Cinderella Aunt Mabel. Fifteen years passed and I was on an airplane flying across the country. I had just begun recording people’s family stories for a radio series I was producing and I struck up a conversation with the man in the seat next to me. He was senior researcher with the Sacramento Blood Center and he was on his way to make a presentation at a conference. Being Japanese-American he told me several stories about his grandmother who had miraculously survived the bombing of Hiroshima during the war. He then began drawing parralels between his work with mine. The giving of blood, he told me, was one of the last true gifting traditions left in America. For the sake of someone they do not know, and in all likelihood will never know, many people are willing to donate a quantity of their own blood. Like the DNA signature in each drop of a person’s blood, family stories are unique to the families who tell them. But blood is also universal. It can be given to those who share the same blood type to revive and sustain life. Likewise, family stories are universal in that they touch on those basic themes shared by all families. When someone makes the gift of one of their own family stories on the radio, the internet, or simply in conversation with a stranger on an airplane or train, they are helping revive the cultural body of human society whether they realize it or not. They are passing on a wisdom for, in the end, that’s what the telling of family stories is all about. They tell us when to laugh and when to cry, when to be generous and when to forgive. God knows there are dark things that happen within families but these are seldom the stories people tell as family stories. No, they tell the kind of stories that somehow point to a deeper purpose, or even a touch of nobility, to our lives. We are part of something bigger, these stories tell us. Our ancestors obviously survived against great odds or we wouldn’t be here. And if there were some laughs, some acts of courage or sagacity along the way, well then all the better. For as the old Hasidic tale would have it, "that’s why God created humankind, he loves stories." |
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©
Joe and Paula McHugh 2007
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